Staff Pick

Coop is perfect for anyone dreaming of a "simple" life in the country — and for those already living it. Perry is a brilliant storyteller, and this is a funny and poignant account of his unorthodox childhood and his current quest for some cred as a parent and homesteader.Recommended by Megan, Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Truck: A Love Story gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.

Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood — his city-bred parents took in more than a hundred foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm — for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.

And when his daughter Amy starts asking about God, Perry is called upon to answer questions for which he's not quite prepared. He muses on his upbringing in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect and weighs the long-lost faith of his childhood against the skeptical alternative (You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness).

Whether Perry is recalling his childhood ("I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon") or what it's like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig ("two firsts in one day"), Coop is filled with the humor his readers have come to expect. But Perry also writes from the quieter corners of his heart, chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.

Alternately hilarious, tender, and as real as pigs in mud, Coop is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the earth, with neighbors, with meaning...and with chickens.

Review:

"Perry (Population: 485) is that nowadays rare memoirist whose eccentric upbringing inspires him to humor and sympathetic insight instead of trauma mongering and self-pity. His latest essays chronicle a year on 37 acres of land with his wife, daughters and titular menagerie of livestock (who are fascinating, exasperating personalities in their own right). But these luminous pieces meander back to his childhood on the hardscrabble Wisconsin dairy farm where his parents, members of a tiny fundamentalist Christian sect, raised him and dozens of siblings and foster-siblings, many of them disabled. Perry's latter-day story is a lifestyle-farming comedy, as he juggles freelance writing assignments with the feedings, chores and construction projects that he hopes will lend him some mud-spattered authenticity. Woven through are tender, uncloying recollections of the homespun virtues of his family and community, from which sprout lessons on the labors and rewards of nurturance (and the occasional need to slaughter what you've nurtured). Perry writes vividly about rural life; peck at any sentence — 'One of the [chickens] stretches, one leg and one wing back in the manner of a ballet dancer warming up before the barre' — and you'll find a poetic evocation of barnyard grace. Photos." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

Several years ago, Michael Perry, a self-described "country chronicler" who made his home in New Auburn, Wis., published "Truck: A Love Story." It's the tale of how he, an aging bachelor and man-about-(small)town, decided to refurbish an ancient but classic International Harvester pickup. "Truck" was tightly constructed, full of village characters and rustic social events, and it also contained two... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) romances, one involving his very eccentric brother, and the other, himself. The book, which ended in the author's wedding, was lighthearted and full of joy.

There's a reason why fairy tales end with "happily ever after," and leave it at that. Marriage can be a horse of a whole other color. Perry and his wife, Anneliese, share a fantasy of subsistence farming. They want to establish a closer connection to the ground and the food they eat; they want to live more authentic lives. This is not a pipe dream: They both come from farming families, and they both practice a frugality that comes close to being pathological. If the American economy ever recovers, it won't be thanks to these two. They abhor buying anything. Living off the land, for them, seems feasible and appropriate.

Perry and Anneliese move into a relative's farm, along with Amy, Anneliese's 6-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. They've been pining for chickens, and, Perry adds, "We are also going rural in the hope that we might become more self-sufficient in terms of firewood, an expanded garden, and perhaps a pair of pigs." But the variable here is the same one that plagued Bronson Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Perry makes his living writing, thinking, lecturing and playing music. In theory, you can farm and think at the same time; in practice, it doesn't always work that well. The author is away from home about 100 days out of every year, pursuing his career. He appears to be a great one for one-time projects — he builds that chicken coop, for instance, over the course of the book. He does it in fits and starts, and that coop serves the structural function that the truck did in his last book. But pigs and chickens need to be fed every day; the garden needs to be shorn of weeds on a regular basis.

Anneliese gets pregnant; she's weary, she suffers from insomnia. Naturally, they decide to have a home birth. Naturally, they're home-schooling Amy. Naturally, every day that he's home, Perry has to go out to his office across the yard from the house and write. He's obsessed with meeting deadlines, a flurry of deadlines. So, while the tone of "Truck" was blithe and cheery, a nagging drag of sadness soon creeps into "Coop." It's as though a flimsy motorboat on a wide lake were being dragged down by an insistent, watery hand.

God knows Perry tries to be cheery. He tells us at length about how he succeeds in building a pig pen from scrap-metal sheeting he finds on the property, about how he and a friend get started on that chicken coop, about the virtues of splitting firewood and putting up hay, but he has made the decision to include some other things here as well — for example, how it was for him growing up. His father owned a small dairy farm. He made a meager living but was responsible for a very large family — six children of his own and enough foster children, some of them severely disabled, to total about 60 over the years. He and his wife belonged to an obscure Christian sect, which was so strict it wouldn't even allow itself a church to meet in. "Poor but pure" could have been his parents' unnervingly saintly motto. The author devotes pages to the horrors of breakfast when he was a kid — a steady stream of Dickensian porridge, made from a variety of questionable and unappetizing grains. Some of this may serve to explain why he shied away from marriage for so many years. He loves his folks, but few people, outside of Mother Teresa, could live up to their standards. (Another, perfectly reasonable question to ask: Who would want to? Put another way: If you can't sleep, why not take a sleeping pill?)

As an old Topanga Canyon hippie, I confess to having raised goats and chickens. I'm biased, reading this, not as a city slicker but as a writer who thinks, as Perry dithers: For God's sake, do your thousand words a day, pay three bills and quit yer complainin'! Stop pontificating to that darling little girl about the sanctity of chores. Don't you know she might grow up to be a writer? How do you think your edifying words are going to sound in her own memoir? And in the future, when you've finished your thousand words, go out and help your wife. She's the one who's been working like a galley slave all through the pages of this book. But Perry, it turns out, is a hand-wringer. He makes earning a living for a family of four sound like storming the Bastille. This book is well worth reading, for just that reason: as a cautionary tale before you go out and buy a pair of pigs, or set about waiting for a flock of reluctant chickens to lay.

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who may be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group) (hide most of this review)

Review:

"Because Perry is an adept storyteller, he balances the sweeter sections with passages evoking the sting of loss and grief....Dryly humorous, mildly neurotic and just plain soulful — a book that might even make you want to buy a few chickens." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

Review:

"[T]ypical Perry: written in an easygoing, talk-to-the-reader style, with a self-effacing sense of humor and an ability to conjure up vivid mental pictures with a few well-chosen words." Booklist

Synopsis:

"Beneath the flannel surface of this deer-hunting, truck-loving Badger is the soul of a poet." &#8212;Chicago Tribune

You'll find in this book a slender silver cord of smart contemplation about meaning and purpose." &#8212;Minneapolis Star Tribune

About the Author

Michael Perry is a contributing editor to Men's Health, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Salon, and The Utne Reader. He lives in northern Wisconsin with his family.

What Our Readers Are Saying

Average customer rating based on 5 comments:

ahatt, January 21, 2010 (view all comments by ahatt)
I was so at home in "Coop"--not because I'm from Wisconsin or because I've raised chickens or pigs, but because Michael Perry tells this reflective, funny, tender, "good 'til the last drop" story so well. I lingered a long while after closing the book.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No(2 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)

ahatt, January 21, 2010 (view all comments by ahatt)
I was so at home in "Coop"--not because I'm from Wisconsin or because I've raised chickens or pigs, but because Michael Perry tells this reflective, funny, tender, "good 'til the last drop" story so well. I lingered a long while after closing the book.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No(4 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)

Annie Oaklee, January 18, 2010 (view all comments by Annie Oaklee)
Toss aside your GPS, iPhone and all its non-essential apps, log off Twitter and walk away from Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Second Life and Flickr. Then open this book and read. You will not be disappointed and you will come away inspired to unplug from the digital nation and enjoy the simpler life. Who knows, you may even want to raise some chickens.

I love Michael Perry's writing and his ability to mix humor with the toils of daily life. That's what gets us through AND living in the three dimensional world really is what it's all about.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No(5 of 8 readers found this comment helpful)

Coop is perfect for anyone dreaming of a "simple" life in the country — and for those already living it. Perry is a brilliant storyteller, and this is a funny and poignant account of his unorthodox childhood and his current quest for some cred as a parent and homesteader.

by Megan

"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Perry (Population: 485) is that nowadays rare memoirist whose eccentric upbringing inspires him to humor and sympathetic insight instead of trauma mongering and self-pity. His latest essays chronicle a year on 37 acres of land with his wife, daughters and titular menagerie of livestock (who are fascinating, exasperating personalities in their own right). But these luminous pieces meander back to his childhood on the hardscrabble Wisconsin dairy farm where his parents, members of a tiny fundamentalist Christian sect, raised him and dozens of siblings and foster-siblings, many of them disabled. Perry's latter-day story is a lifestyle-farming comedy, as he juggles freelance writing assignments with the feedings, chores and construction projects that he hopes will lend him some mud-spattered authenticity. Woven through are tender, uncloying recollections of the homespun virtues of his family and community, from which sprout lessons on the labors and rewards of nurturance (and the occasional need to slaughter what you've nurtured). Perry writes vividly about rural life; peck at any sentence — 'One of the [chickens] stretches, one leg and one wing back in the manner of a ballet dancer warming up before the barre' — and you'll find a poetic evocation of barnyard grace. Photos." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review),
"Because Perry is an adept storyteller, he balances the sweeter sections with passages evoking the sting of loss and grief....Dryly humorous, mildly neurotic and just plain soulful — a book that might even make you want to buy a few chickens."

"Review"
by Booklist,
"[T]ypical Perry: written in an easygoing, talk-to-the-reader style, with a self-effacing sense of humor and an ability to conjure up vivid mental pictures with a few well-chosen words."

"Synopsis"
by Harper Collins,
"Beneath the flannel surface of this deer-hunting, truck-loving Badger is the soul of a poet." &#8212;Chicago Tribune

You'll find in this book a slender silver cord of smart contemplation about meaning and purpose." &#8212;Minneapolis Star Tribune

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